John Howard Griffin Quote

The music consumed in its blatant rhythm all other rhythms, even that of the heartbeat. I wondered how all this would look to the casual observer, or to the whites in their homes. The niggers are whooping it up over on Mobile Street tonight, they might say. They’re happy. Or, as one scholar put it, Despite their lowly status, they are capable of living jubilantly. Would they see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter, so oppressive that men had to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it? The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man’s soul. You are black. You are condemned. This is what the white man mistook for jubilant living and called whooping it up. This is how the white man can say, They live like dogs, never realizing why they must, to save themselves, shout, get drunk, shake the hip, pour pleasures into bellies deprived of happiness. Otherwise, the sounds from the quarter would lose order and rhythm and become wails.